I wouldn't lump the various cloud services in with things like webflow. With a cloud service you can do things the old fashioned (and still better) way by signing up with AWS (for example) and getting a nice Linux install, enabling you to fire up the command line tool . Most decent developers are at that point ready to go.

I tried webflow just for ducks. I honestly can't quite understand the point behind it. And even if in my brief peek at it I'm just being dense, who knows what kind of code they're writing behind the scenes?

I'm old enough to remember NetObjects Fusion (I think that was the name - it's not worth googling). That and FrontPage wrote such horrific code that they became the butt of jokes in developer communities. Webflow has to be writing code somewhere, too. I wonder what that looks like. GPT-3 and other AI technologies look interesting, but none of these are yet within reach of the average maker wannabe.

Also, let's not mistake tooling for drag and drop. In other words, for example, if I use a scaffolding tool to set up a react or angular or backbone environment, I'm really just taking advantage of somebody's nice script writing skills to save myself hours in mundane development efforts. There are so many excellent tools out there that there are no development shops on earth that don't use them.

At the very end of the day, is there really such a thing as a "maker" in the development world? Don't most of us actually *want* to code? Part of the reason I couldn't really give webflow a good evaluation was because I found it boring.

Coding is fun. Drag and drop is not.

And if the idea is to get apps and websites into the hands of non-developers, that is probably not a great idea, either. How many news web sites are now unreadable because of the way their advertising and those awful paid sponsor links are set up? I have to turn javascript off to read almost any news site these days (they seem to work better on phones, though).

Security is also an issue. Do we want non-developers cranking out apps and web sites with no mindset towards security? Do any of these people know anything about setting up secure forms? Do the drag and drop products they use know anything about it?